A Dilemma!

Everything’s waking up again; voles, birds, rabbits, hares and many creatures in between; blue tits and robins have muscles to die for from all the nuts, fatballs and seed they have devoured at my expense. However, we now have a more sinister beastie living alongside us; ‘Ratty’ has taken up residence at the corner of our rockery – just a metre away from the bird feeders. On the wall, happily sharing breakfast are robins, blackbirds, finches, woodpeckers, nuthatches, chaffinches, dunnocks, tits and now, Ratty; a healthy, Brown rat - Rattus norvegicus.  

At the base of the rockery wall are Pheasant, English and French partridge, two pigeons, a crow and a kestrel hovering over his own, private fly-through takeaway. The owls are asleep – they come out later and hoover up whoever’s still out there.

Ratty takes a piece of toast back to his larder, the blue-tits, nuts and bread to theirs and the kestrel, when he scores a direct, airborne hit, a blue-tit or two to the top of his telegraph pole or cow shed roof, depending on the morning’s preference.

Ratty bothered me. Rats, plague and paranoia are all, to us humans, much inter-related, so like the hunter I once was, I dragged from my gun safe a .458 side lock Winchester Magnum, slid two soft point 500 grain cartridges into the breach and opened the landing window (for that little lot, read: .22 air rifle – doesn’t sound nearly as impressive though). Within a couple of minutes the eye piece of my scope was filled with furry, puffed up cheeks, little ears and two sparkling eyes that bored right through my wussy, unable-to-pull-the-trigger soul. So, two weeks later, guess who’s still with us and on a daily basis, happily plunders the bird food. Think I’ll hire a professional hunter to do the dreaded deed, but there again, Ratty didn’t ask to be Ratty and as long he or she stays in the singular... Let’s see what the summer brings.

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An English Boy’s Wanderings; another re-written excerpt:

 ... Our little Morris Minor took us into and out of Bulawayo without mishap. The streets were amazing; all of them really wide and straight as arrows – streets and avenues at right angles to one another. All, from what we had been told were wide enough to turn a wagon and full span of oxen through one hundred and eighty degrees with space to spare. But that was in the old days. Now the middle bits are filled up with car-park spaces.

‘Turn left into Selborne Avenue,’ Mother instructed and father swung us in line with one hundred and sixty seven miles of road that would, all being well, take us into our new, adopted mining town – Mashaba.

Mother had bought half a dozen steak and kidney pies from Downing’s Bakery. Her Thermos was un-stoppered and to go with the pies, everyone got their part-filled cup of lukewarm tea. Within twenty minutes Bulawayo had disappeared.

Mother unfolded a Caltex road map across her knees, her finger now the non-stop seeker of unknown highways and new names.

‘Essexvale,’ she smiled to herself. ‘That’s the first town we come to. Then a place called Bala Bala?’ She looked sideways at my father. ‘What kind of name is that?’

‘Bit like Wagga Wagga in Australia,’ said my Dad and got glowered at. ‘Must be one of those native names?’

The road was wider now; full tar – no missing piece in the middle, but not for long.

‘Slow down there’s a sign.’ Mother craned her neck, bumped her head on the windscreen and bent her cigarette. ‘Detour?’ A line of forty-four gallon oil drums had been strung across the road. ‘Must be road works.’

We followed the arrows. The tar macadam disappeared. Now the road, like a giant skiffle-board threatened to shake our Noddy car to pieces – like driving over a corrugated iron roof but twice as bad. Then we hit a smooth patch and a single-decker, ‘Shu-Shine’ logoed juggernaut from Hades thundered past. I looked up from my little window and caught a glimpse of glassed in, black faces staring down at me; white eyes and coloured headscarves – then the bus was gone. What dust there had been on the road was now in the air and stones the size of butter beans thrashed our windscreen. Mother screamed, my father cursed and I learned a string of new, exciting words...

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